I wear these everywhere, it was inspired by Grace jones, obviously with the hood, that hair on my head is a full wig that I had sound in my head that I never took off ever.

I wore probably one of three different outfits for about five years straight because that's what I could afford at the time and I wanted people always to recognize me, so this was my initial iconic look, you can tell from the way that I'm standing there, that I already felt like a star before anything came out and I would say to anybody that's young and watching that, you know, if you believe in yourself, you don't need other people to tell you, you're great to know that you're an artist on the inside already.

Mhm So this was for the much Music Awards, This was designed by tom Talman Studios, but I want to be very specific the jewelry that I'm wearing on this is what we called the fire bra, I wanted it to shoot fire from my breasts but we decided it was safer to shoot sparks.

So essentially what would happen is I had a remote control in my hand that once I pressed it, it triggered this fire brought to go off.

And what would happen was a piece of steel would rub against uh was essentially like a flint and it would spin very fast and the sparks would shoot off of me.

And I used to joke and say I need my jewelry and then they would bring my fire brought.

And those are pleaser boots that we had studied.

I've won the same stripper heels, my entire career, their tried and true and they're worth it.

Yeah.

Oh, I love this one.

This is Atsuko kudo.

This is when I was in England and I was meeting the queen and I wanted to dress like a queen uh in a british fashion.

And I also wanted to do it in my way, but we thought that we would give this look of a queen a modern twist by making it in latex.

And at the time, Atsuko kudo was the only designers that I could think of, that we're actually um tailoring latex in this way.

It's very difficult to tailor latex.

Well, this was a wonderful evening.

This was my first ever Grammy Awards.

And Armani wanted to dress me and I was actually very excited to be dressed by Armani because I knew that everything would be tailored perfectly and it would also be high fashion.

So, this piece fit me absolutely perfect.

What's also very funny is that these shoes were stolen backstage after the show.

I think we found them later on E bay somewhere and we, we found out how to get them back.

I just wanted to give a very specific shout out also to Frederica spirits who designed this hair.

He was the one who for the first time put um this idea of creating this piss yellow hair color as a way of uh celebrating pop art in motion.

So if you think about Liechtenstein for example, the way blondes were represented was with yellow hair and this was a very special night.

I had just won a grammy before this happened my first grammy.

I went right before I wore this.

Okay, well here's me and Beyonce.

This was created by house of gaga and perry Meek Me and Beyonce Really in this video, we wanted there to be a balance between fashion and camp.

So we wanted to do a play on the american flag and a play on capitalism.

The inspiration for the Americana vibe was that the song, telephone was about being inundated with phone calls.

I was playing around when I wrote that song with this idea that we were as a society becoming more and more obsessed with interacting with each other uh in a way that was less real.

And that led me to this uh the ingesting of capitalism in a way that's not healthy for us.

So it's a commentary on american culture.

So the meat dress, it's actually val garland's idea.

Val garland, the makeup artist and her and I worked together for a long time and she shared a story with me where she had gone to a party wearing sausages and I thought this was quite funny and I said, well, that's a great way to make sure that everybody leaves you alone at a party.

I was speaking with my artistic friends about if we wanted to make any statements while we were at the MTV video music awards and we did want to make a statement because at the time, uh, they were trying to repeal, don't ask, don't tell.

But we decided to do the meat dress because I thought to myself, if you were willing to die for your country, what does it matter how you identify?

This was ultimately designed by frank Fernandez, but it was the brainchild of House of gaga.

And we were backstage with Brandon Maxwell who was working as one of my stylists at the time.

He was vegan also and still helping to sell all of these last bits of meat to me and making my meat hat and my meat purse, which was held by share.

It smelled like me.

It was thrilling to where there's a corset under this.

But the course, it was a sewn into the meat.

So this is actually a garment.

They didn't just drape meat over me and uhh cross their fingers.

This was the McQueen dress from his last collection that I wore.

And we recreated the feathers.

But I am wearing the armadillo heels from Plato's Atlantis, which was the crescendo before we unfortunately lost him.

I've always been inspired by alexander McQueen.

I think he's potentially the greatest designer of all time.

This dress in particular, It does actually represent a lot of what I love about him, which is that, you know, this is a bosch print.

And if you know anything about bosch art, uh, there's sort of these, this violence and these tiny little odd things that are happening that too many are grotesque and ugly and wrong.

And somehow he found beauty in these things and that was a piece of him and he celebrated women and he celebrated all types of women.

Okay, so this next piece we would call this an outfit.

Everybody calls it the egg.

But it's actually a vessel that was designed by Hussein Shalane.

The outfits that are worn by uh, the models and dancers that are around me.

That was created by house of gaga.

I was very particular about the way the fashion looked for this performance in so much as the night before the performance.

I said the fashions wrong, we don't have it.

We need it to be latex.

We need nude latex.

And if you know anything about looking for latex years ago was very difficult to find latex in any other place other than a sex shop or where we found this late tax was a bus company had latex that they were using to cover the seats of their busses and we found the latex and we asked if we could buy it from them.

So everybody's fashion that's made here was made from the fabric of seats four of us.

I was in the egg for three days to be honest at award shows, especially during this time, I didn't like to talk to people.

I always felt that it threw me off of my performance.

So this in a lot of ways, is really representative of my devotion to my craft and that I really wanted to be with myself.

Okay, so this is joe calderon, This is an alter ego that I made and I wanted to be subversive and this was my way of creating a different type of statement for myself at this time I was actually going through a breakup.

So I actually created this character that was my boyfriend.

I inhabited this character joe Calderone.

So it was representative of relationship representative of my father as well.

But everything about this was just meant to be kind of a jersey boy grazer.

I'm always fully in character when I, when I've been joe, it's a feeling and I wanted him to be dirty and I rehearsed a lot with the boys and I have little lifts in my shoes to keep me a little bit taller because I'm short.

Okay, this is one of my favorite photo shoots that nick and I ever did Nick Knight and I for this outfit, we had this idea of shooting me inside of what was essentially meant to be um placenta fluid.

We created this artistic goo and the goo artist was Bart Hess and I am wearing high heels in it.

I can see they look like Givenchy, McQueen.

Givenchy and I have this huge hat on that I believe is that Stephen jones hat.

But this goo that you see on me, it started out sort of in one way and then as I performed for nick for several hours, the goose started to take many different forms.

This is a garment, but this is a moving garment.

Now, this is the american music awards and I wanted to do something fun and exciting and whimsical.

And I thought, why not come to the american music awards as the actual ad for my versace campaign with donatella.

So I wanted to arrive as this, you know, italian goddess that she had turned me into for the campaign if we'd like to include my accessories.

For example, my purse this evening was a mechanical horse.

We decided to wear the horse as a way to get onto the red carpet, but we wanted it to be exciting.

So we painted her white.

But guess what?

The horse is made out of Chanel purses so that horses my purse.

Okay, so this next look, I wore this in London.

I believe I was leaving the Langham Hotel and it was during the promotion from my album Artpop, which was heavily scrutinized album, but I believed in putting art in the front and the whole record was about how art can mean anything to you.

So, I often did my own takes on other artists as well as uh, iconography throughout history.

So, of course, I visited Picasso.

I still have those ruffle socks to this day that they're about to 99 I'm wearing this jacket.

Uh, it's really actually a sweatshirt from Dog in Tokyo Dog is a really, really dope store in the Harajuku area.

And then, uh, Frederick s paris did my hair and we were obsessed with this sort of odd combination of black and blonde at the same time, Tara Savella was brilliant.

My makeup artists, we used a technique in Harajuku makeup as a way to create an in my eyes by creating the pupil on the eyelid.

And often I'll do this with fashion depending on what it is.

I'll hold my face in a particular way in order to get the expression across that I find interesting.

So in order to look like a Picasso, I sort of have this sort of fractured look on my face and I have one eye closed to reveal the other.

I.

I don't think there's much, that's, that's more punk than this look uh represents a very dark time in my life, but often the darkest times in my life, you'll see the most joyful outfits.

This was created by dan Henderson and vex clothing.

So this is inflatable, was very lightweight, if this was made in any other way would be quite heavy, but I was able to just run about the stage and this and this is absolute club, kid culture clothing, which was something that we really wanted to celebrate at the Artpop ball because it was all about celebrating art, celebrating music, but also celebrating the way that those things come together underground.

This piece in particular was created on an airplane.

We were flying to Greece and so much of Artpop was inspired by greek sculptures.

When I landed in Greece, I wanted to land as the venus.

Uh so we created this on an airplane.

So I'm wearing stripper shoes, I'm wearing two metal seashells that we just had and then I've got a song underneath and I believe that this is some sort of beach situation that I had with me because I was excited to get some sun in Greece.

This was a performance art piece.

So when we got off the plane, me and my entire group of dancers, we walked out to my song venus and I was wearing this outfit, don't rest on the plane.

Mhm.

So this was created by Jack Irving.

This is all made of Mylar and I actually was wearing a ventilation system that was pumping air into the spikes, but I didn't let the spikes reveal themselves until I was standing in front of the paparazzi.

So when I got out of the car it just looked like a Mylar cape.

And then in the middle of the street, I pressed a button and I inflated the entire piece.

I was very interested in inflatable fashion at this point, this was just simply to freak out the paparazzi.

This is a beautiful, beautiful dress.

Me in my Brandon Maxwell felt like a princess in it and I felt like a little girl.

It was a very simple, beautifully made black dress and I won my first Oscar in that dress.

I remember I also had to be in charge of taking care of that.

Tiffany's diamond, that Audrey Hepburn.

Warren, No one had worn it since she wore it for breakfast at Tiffany's.

So, I was the first person to wear it.

And I remember I left the Oscars to go to a party and I left security behind and everybody's mad at me.

Sorry, sorry, Tiffany's, I love you.

And you got your diamond back.

This is also Brandon Maxwell.

Brandon dressed me for the met gala when the theme was camp by means of the definition by Susan Sontag.

I found this to be very fun this was an entire performance that we prepared for the carpet.

I remember calling and asking her for 15 to 20 minutes to be on the red carpet.

And she was very kind to give us that time.

You know, one of the things that I love about reading Susan Sontag's thoughts on camp was that things become camp over time.

So what we did with this, that what Brandon I thought was really a genius to do was he took us all the way sort of back to the Lower East side by the end of me, revealing all of these looks and it was just me and fishnets with a sequined bra and panty, which is the way that I used to perform.

I used to call it pop burlesque, meaning our version of camp was the Old Me.

I mean, I think this is in some ways uh, so indicative of the earlier things that we looked at.

If I if I could just for a moment switch back to hear.

To me, this really looks like an elevated modern progression of where I used to be.

And this is my album cover.

Sissy Leo Cosio Martinez is the designer.

Another designer on this garment is gasoline glamour and Gary faded the fingers and the hands.

This was a creation of a glove actually that had articulation.

So, as I move my fingers, there was extended fingers that had joints that moved like an alien and I couldn't have possibly walked in these shoes.

One of them on the left side here.

This was about a nine inch knife, a real knife.

And then this was a horn here on the other side and the horn was longer than the shoe.

This is an exercise in what I would love for people to understand is really creating art with fashion and it not being about it being functional for everyday life, but about it being functional for art, I love becoming art.

That's something I've said throughout my whole career.